Author: Pelgris

This pandemic life

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I missed a post yesterday. I acknowledge my failure and offer this response:

Isolation from those we love coupled with physical situation changes, eg working from home and closed gyms, has effected me deeply.

It’s hard to build relationships without physical presence. Not impossible. Just hard. But it’s the lack of exercise, good food, and regular companionship from friends which just sends me deeper inside.

I try to keep up emotionally. I’m doing the work. But some days it’s too much. Today(Monday) was one of those days. Mostly I’ve managed to post a song or a haiku to cover but I couldn’t find the motivation today. I ended up sleeping for 8 hours immediately after work and I’m still tired.

Usually, I love the cold bite in the air and the approaching solstice. Now I feel like it is more of the same. And the levers I would normally use to regulate my feelings are either not available or are physically distant.

It is a lot.

I miss the family of choosing which I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of.

As to the blog. I will be better. I’ll need to devote some spoons. It is important to me. And while it would be easy to quit, the damage from doing so would have repercussions. So I guess anyone who reads here stillbis stuck with me.

Linguistic navel gazing

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Words have both literal and contextual meanings. To limit ourselves to the literal is to diminish our ability to perceive beyond mere surface and into the heart of the world.

Let us take up an example.

Mend: repair something that is broken or damaged
Fix: mend or repair

Those are the definitions of those words.

But what do we feel when we say we are fixing something? The implication is that its hard and we are using outside forces to make(force) something into a working mode.

It’s very much an outside in word. Fix implies that outside influence, outside actions are the only means of bringing something back to function.

Now lets look at mend.
Mend feels softer. It feels like I am inside the thing or a part of the thing. It is more like healing. A slow rebinding to allow something to be whole.

It does not insist on itself. It offers instead.

To put another way, if I surgically staple a wound closed I have fixed it. The wound is closed.

But its not, is it? Not until the wound is mended and the staples(the fix) are no longer needed.

So we could consider that a fix is a temporary solution for a permanent problem and only by mending the problem does the problem cease.

We have a tendency to fix things. To implement hasty(implying quick and slipshod) fixes and fail to mend the underlying wound.

Tackling things from a vocabulary point of view may seem foolish but it is through language that we see and interpret our world. It is a base and fundamental building block for society. And we need to examine and construct it with care.

Lies told by the comfortable

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I’m old enough to have been warmed by the flames
Watched as the heart and soul of a country burned
Watched as the flames reached higher
As the middle class blamed those with less
Blamed those without
While the Rich paid themselves for existing
Removed protections and taxes
Things that made economic mobility possible
Made it possible to work less than forever
Buy a house
Be out of debt
Not be drawn further and further into
No way out
The last flames are burning
Soon there will be nothing left
What choices will we make
The generation of my parents
Are turning on anyone who isn’t them
My generation is either complicit or stand by
Some rage in the streets
But the generations that follow
Need to rise and dismantle this
That means the senate and the house
Local government legislature
We need to make every effort
But I fear that we are falling
And nothing is left but to burn

Embrace me as a flower growing by starlight

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Soft petals turned razor sharp
Soft sadness at wounds too small to ever heal
Scarred by healing
Marks littering my body
Closed and hiding in daylight
A thing of thorns and pain

I grow full by starlight
Cloaked in the night
Scars hidden and covered
By the frozen expanse
Blooms shiver in the this never-ending
While I awake anew

We share a world but we’re not in the same one
Mine has dangers sharp as blades
Lies as comfortable as clouds
Truths as broken as glass

Plant yourself close
I will grow
And protect you shelter you

the broken rose of the winter night
A field of unknown stars
An ocean of pain and beauty
Beneath a frozen moon

The inevitability of living

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The death toll is rising. And people in my communities are lying to themselves about its lethality. They lie from ignorance. From fear. Living in a deep state of denial and hopeless despair.

The ones who aren’t lying share memes and try to be informed and they are wearing masks. Trying to do everything, to get everything right.

It’s heartbreaking to watch.

For me, it’s not the deep tragedy of the dying. Which I see. I feel. But it’s not what wrenches my soul.

I’m steeped in death. I know its grip. I know its measure. Death is the brother who walks beside me. Waiting to embrace me when I end.

We all end.

What brings tears to my eyes is all of the people who haven’t been had to form bonds with death. Who are lost and can’t see past this. They keep looking for the mythic safety. The mythic future. And set themselves up to burn out. To collapse. They keep celebrating momentary triumph. And each time tragedy steals back that triumph they break a little bit more.

They are not in a place where they can hear what I would say.

So I’ll say it here. For whoever is still listening.

Life exists in the small moments of joy. It is only in the ever present now that we are. That is the only place you can be in for now. Listen to music contrary to a bleak mood. Turn off the news as much as possible, their job is to sell fear.

Once you have done all that you can. Let the rest go. It’s extremely difficult to acknowledge the lack of control. But try anyway.

And to the Nurses and Doctors and other Healthcare professionals, I know you’ve been taught that you save lives. That is where your heart is.
But what you really do is give people more time. Sometimes there is no time left. Sometimes that’s another hour. Sometimes it’s the rest of their life.

You are burning yourselves up, trying to win an unwinnable war. You can’t change the battle. So you must change the objective.

I know how unhelpful this feels. Let it sit with you. It’s a hard lesson to learn.

Nerves jumble on the tip of a tongue

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Sitting on the uneven ground
Looking out the sun blind window
Life exists out there in the trembling blue
Waiting for the reach
The grab

Holding on the hardest part
Pulled or pulling
Hard to find that balance

Building a life when age has allowed us to build These esoteric edifices
Tear it all down?

Or try to find spaces in each other

Life out in the blue
Yearning for the shiver of home

Celebration of the dying flame

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In the summer dreary
I wake from dreaming, leary
Living in a haze of before

Last looks leave me reeling
Last words etching
Seven years to be free

Stride into winter
Calling out the world to come
Reborn in the cold expanse

One second to collapse
That small puncture
Leaking air

Give me a moment to breathe
Never let me go
Never hold me enough
What’s one more day

One more day
In an eternity of without

Stretched out under the endless expanse

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Thin blue
Pale as a robins egg
Stillness great enough to drown in
Great enough to swim away from here
To freedom
Were I not bound
The weak force holds me
And distance
And time wear away
What I want seems like less of a choice
More dream
More hope
For the slowly dying
In the minutes passing